On Tuesday, February 8, poet B. H. Fairchild will read from his collection of poems The Art of the Lathe, which was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Award for Poetry. The 7:30 p.m. program, in room 1 of the Olin Science Center at Colby College, is open to the public free of charge. Copies of the book will be for sale during a reception following the reading.

Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe covers a wide range of subjects, including the working-class world of the Midwest, the isolation of small-town life and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas. The Art of the Lathe won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the California Book Award, the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award and the Beatrice Hawley Award.

Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas and University of Tulsa and now lives with his wife and daughter in Claremont, Calif. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a California Arts Grant, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers Conference and a National Writers Union First Prize. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Southern Review, Poetry, Triquarterly, Hudson Review, Salmagundi and Sewanee Review. Fairchild’s poetry collections include Local Knowledge, The System of Which the Body Is One Part, Flight and The Arrival of the Future. He is also the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake.

Fairchild’s reading is part of Colby’s 1999-2000 Visiting Writers Series.